Alura is an Etsy tool that helps you with keyword research, product research and listing optimisation.
But is it any good? And how should I use it?
In this review, Iâll show you a peek inside the Alura app and how you can use it to its best potential to improve your Etsy sales.
Alura has a free plan which basic access to all the tools, which is a great way to test it out before upgrading.
Click here to start using Alura for FREE
And if you are doing research regularly or want to incorporate email marketing to your Etsy business, you can upgrade to Starter plan or Professional plan:
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Here is a coupon code for 30% discount if you decide to upgrade to a paid plan. Use code GROW30 to get a 30% discount for your first month.
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Alura uses a combination of different data like views, favourites and more to estimate a listingâs monthly sales and total sales.
Alura claims a 80% accuracy of the estimated sales, which I find mostly true based on my experience. It means for a product that sells 10 a month, Alura is likely to estimate the sale to be around 8-12.
While the accuracy rate isn't 100%, Alura provides a lot of analysis and insights that are hard to find elsewhere. You can make much more informed decision based on this tool, and that means you are less likely to waste your effort in areas that donât matter as much.
Keep in mind that when âsalesâ and ârevenueâ are mentioned in this guide, they are the estimated number by Alura.
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Despite the higher price, Alura is one of the best Etsy market research tools on the market. The set of features is comprehensive and useful for most Etsy sellers, no matter they are just starting a shop doing market research, or trying to grow by building a customer email list.
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Click here to start using Alura for free
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And use code GROW30 to get 30% off your first month.
And let's jump into how I use Alura to find winning product ideas:
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In my opinion, the Chrome Extension is the best part of the Alura toolset. It works directly on Etsy and can show you useful information that is otherwise hidden.
One important trick is to use the Alura Chrome extension in an incognito browser. So that personal recommendations wonât affect the search results and skew your research.
On Etsy, search a keyword and open the extension. It will load the listings and their information. Scroll down to load more listings for more accurate results.
There are a few insights here that are very useful:
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Typical sales indicates the general demand for this keyword. The higher this figure is, the higher the demand it is on Etsy.
The score looks at both the sales numbers and the level of competition. Higher score is better because it means the sales are generally high with relatively low competition. I would recommend choosing keywords with a score of 6 or higher for the best chance of success.Â
You can click the trend button next to the score to show Google trend for this keyword. It can give you an idea whether this keyword is seasonal or evergreen. Or you can use it to predict the demand so you can add seasonal trending products before your competition.Â
Underneath, you can see information for different products ranking for this keyword.
With this list of products, you can:
Sort listings by monthly sales to see the top selling products of the last 30 days.
Sort listings by revenue to see the potentially more profitable products with higher prices.
Another feature is that you can see the listing tags, which Etsy hides nowadays. When you click on a listing, you will see the listing details including the listing tags. This means you can see the tags that top selling products use and get inspirations. You can click to copy all tags at once, or you can choose the ones that are relevant to your products.
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Alura extension can also be used in a particular Etsy shop. This could be your competitorâs shop, or it could be a trending shop that inspires you.
Once you are in the shop, open the Chrome extension and it will load the product information. You may need to scroll down to load more products.
After the products are loaded, you can press âmonthly salesâ to show the bestselling products in this shop. They are the products that are high in demand. Going through the list may give you some new product ideas.
Or you can sort the products by price to see whether the shop offers higher priced items, which could mean items with higher potential profit margin.
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One of the unique features of Alura is their Email Sender. It integrates directly to your Etsy shop which no other email marketing services do. You can send two types of emails: Transactional emails (emails that you can send to customers) and subscriber campaigns (emails that you can only send to people who subscribed to your email list).
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Transactional emails give you more control over the automatic emails sent to your customers. It can be useful in boosting your revenue and enhancing customer relationship. For example, the order confirmation email is a great opportunity for an upsell. One idea is to ask them to purchase another item within 24 hours and get combined free shipping.
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For subscriber campaigns, you can set up automatic emails that get triggered by certain events, like when an order gets delivered or when customer left a review. This gives you a great opportunity to win them back with a second purchase.
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Keyword Finder helps you discover new keywords and gauge its demand/competition.
After you enter a keyword, it will show you some useful insights:
Views, Favourites & Sales - These numbers are based on 1,000 of the listings using this keyword. They reveal information about the demand.
Competition & Shops Competing - These two number reveals the competition of this keyword. âCompetitionâ means the number of listings ranking under this keyword and âshops competingâ shows the number of unique shops ranking under this keyword.
In general, you should aim for keywords that are higher in demand with less competition to improve your chance of success on Etsy.
When you scroll down, you can see a list of similar keywords.
They are ranked by the âpopularityâ, which measures how often a keyword is used by the listings using the current keyword that you search.Â
For example, when you search âminimalist ringâ, the keyword âdainty ringâ has a popularity of 10%. It means 10% of listings under the keyword âminimalist ringâ also uses âdainty ringâ as a keyword.
You can press the âload moreâ button to get more related keywords, but unfortunately the button disappears often after pressing it once, making it impossible to get more keyword inspirations. Hopefully Alura will be able to fix this soon as this function has great potential.
You can also click the trend button on the right-hand side to get the google trend data for this keyword, which can show whether itâs an evergreen or a seasonal keyword.
This tab shows the price distribution of the products under this keywords and other information like categories, processing time, etc. Â
Here you can see the most popular listings using the keyword that you searched. I like sorting the listings by monthly sales to see whatâs selling now.
When you click a listing, it will open a detailed view on the left to show you more information like the title, tags, views, etc.
Unlike the Chrome extension, the prices here are the original price, and discount is not being taken into account. When ârevenueâ is calculated, it uses the original price which can sometimes exaggerate the number.
Product seeker can help you discover winning product ideas on Etsy. There are filters that can help you search for specific products.
Some of the filters that I find particularly useful:
Filter a minimum sales or monthly sales - This can help you find product ideas that have great potential, but keep in mind that they are likely to be more competitive as well.
Filter price - This way you can find competitors that compete directly in your price range.
Filter item type - Turn these on depending on the products you sell. For example, when Iâm doing research for my digital template Etsy shop, I would change to only show digital items.
You can also start with doing a broad search with fewer filters. And once you identified some product ideas that have potential, you can narrow down the search with filters.
After you press the search button, Alura will load the products the relevant products. Scroll down to press âload moreâ to get more product ideas. Once you get a good list of products, you can sort the top selling products by clicking âmonthly salesâ. Or the most expensive one if you want to sell higher priced products. Keep in mind that the price shown here doesnât include discount.
If you want to see the details of a product, just click it to open the sidebar on the left.
The Shop Analyzer gives more in-depth information than using the Chrome Extension on an Etsy shop.
When you first land on this tool before search for a particular shop, you can see the top 500 trending Etsy shop. They are ranked by their estimated monthly sales. This is great for getting inspirations of popular products, and learning from top Etsy shops.
Hereâs what you will see and what important information to get when you analyse a shop:
Here you will find information on all its products, including sales, prices, etc.Â
The listings are sorted with their monthly sales, so it makes it easy to see what products are selling well. And you can click on a listing, you will get a detailed view with title, tags, estimated revenue, etc.
Itâs also good to find potential new product ideas that your close competitors are selling but you are not.
In this tab, you can see some charts about the shopâs best selling products and the sales distribution.
For sales distribution, it shows whatâs the percentage of listings that contributes to 80% of the total sales. A more even the distribution (the distribution is closer to 50%-50%) means the sales are coming from a wide variety of listings. Â
The section showing the shopâs most used tags is also useful. Going through the list can inspire you with tags youâll havenât used for your listings, which can help you reach more shoppers.
And the price distribution chart can help you see what price points this shop is offering.
Thereâs a gem in this tab.
You can see a shopâs message to buyer, which is otherwise not possible to know unless you buy from that shop. This is useful to learn other shopâs customer service.
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For example, you can see the message to buyer from a shop that made over 1.7 million sales:
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This section analyse your listings and give them a score of how optimise they are. And they give you pretty actionable recommendations of how to improve the listings.Â
You can start with the lowest scored listings first and work your way up.
After you make changes, you can re-analyze the listing and it will give you a new (hopefully improved) score.
There are some extra tools that Alura includes with the subscription that help your shop:
Best Selling Etsy Shop - You can view the highest selling shops and trending shops in different categories. Great way to learn from the best selling shops and improve your own.
Etsy Privacy Policy Generator - Love this tool. It can easily generate a privacy policy for you in just minutes.
Etsy Fee Calculator - Useful in calculating your profit margin and find your selling prices.
Etsy Shop Kit - At the time of writing, they only have 3 pre-made designs, but it could be a good starting point.
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There are some Alura alternatives (free or paid) in the market. Click here to find out which Etsy SEOÂ and keyword research tool is the best for your shop.
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